Monday morning. The second day. After I’m brought in, you lean over the prisoner’s dock, bounce on your toes. I try to still my hands, to quiet the clanking of my shackles.
‘I have a surprise,’ you say. A small grin. There’s no time to say more than that, for the judge is coming in.
I’d welcome a surprise. The events of last Friday, and the week-end at Newgate, have worn me out. There was a riot last night: a group of the old girls hacking at the cell with stones chipped out of the wall. It’s how they say goodbye to the stone jug when they’ve been sentenced to the hulks. Transportation is a fate worse than the gibbet, some say. Though I’d welcome it now. It’s no wonder they behave so in there, for a corset drawn too tight is bound to split, and even more so if you squirm against it. Newgate’s that sort of corset. They squeeze us from there to the Old Bailey to the Dead Man’s Walk to the gallows. Like they’re making sausages. The thought makes me clutch at my own stomach, and I’m taken aback for a moment to feel silk there. I look down. A new dress. I’d almost forgotten. One of the good-doers brought it on Saturday. Something for court. You can’t wear that rough thing you had on yesterday. They’ll convict you on the strength of that alone. I do feel the power of this new dress. A kind of dignity coming back. A greater confidence. Held up by that, and your promise of good news, I hold my skirts, and lean forward so I can pay attention.
When you tell the judge you’d like to recall Dr Wilkes, Jessop sits up, frowns.
‘I know he was here on Friday, My Lord,’ you say smoothly. ‘I noted Your Lordship’s observations about time on that occasion. However, a few questions have arisen and I’d beg Your Lordship’s indulgence. I won’t need to trouble him long.’
You lift one of your papers, and peer at the doctor over the edge of it. ‘Dr Wilkes. The science of pathology enables our bodies to speak, when we can no longer speak for ourselves.’
‘In the sense that the body itself can tell how it died, that is correct.’
You nod, as if to flatter him with your approval. ‘But there’s an art to it?’
‘Art?’
‘Knowing what to look for. An understanding of human nature . . .’
He smiles. ‘Knowing what to look for separates scientists from charlatans. And I dare say actually finding it separates them from artists.’
There are a few chuckles. The doctor lifts his hand to stroke his chin and I fix my eyes on his fingers. Thick as sausages. How does he work with those? In my mind’s eye, they root in blood, pull flesh apart, spoon out livers and brains and hearts. I sway on my feet, close my eyes, and see the Surgeon, waggling his own paws.
‘Did you note Madame Benham’s stomach contents, Doctor?’
‘I applied a stomach pump, yes.’
‘What did you find?’
‘Only the remains of the ordinary food she had taken.’
‘Nothing unusual?’
He gives a shrug. ‘Carrots.’
‘Anything else?’
‘What are you getting at?’
‘You’ve been in court before, Doctor?’
‘More often than you, by the look of things.’ Laughter billows out across the gallery. The doctor lets the wind take his chest, smiles up at them.
‘Many times, then?’
‘I believe my curriculum vitae was established on Friday last, when you declined to ask me any questions.’
‘Yes. Very well. Let’s come to it.’ You fiddle with one of the inkwells, bend over it as a woman might, to smooth an iron over a cloth. I’d have liked a trade like yours, I think. Selling words.
‘You see, it’s been said many times, here in this very court, that only God sees a man’s heart. But I wonder . . . We must try, mustn’t we, to see to each other’s hearts?’
‘Is that what lawyers do now, Mr Pettigrew?’ He smirks.
‘Even surgeons must try.’
‘There’s no room for sentiment in a surgeon.’
‘Or an anatomist?’
‘There’s not much call for it. Corpses being incapable of emotion.’
‘But you’ve built your profession on the fact that they speak! People come to you, Dr Wilkes, no matter the condition you receive them in. People, who were . . . partial to figs! Or the smell of their babies, the joy of walking beside the ocean, the prick of the sun on one’s nose, and ‒’ You stop, as if embarrassed. ‘Well . . . any of those small joys that may come a man’s way while he has the breath for them.’
Dr Wilkes smirks up at the judge. ‘A pretty speech, My Lord, but I wonder, what is the relevance of these questions concerning a woman who’s been stabbed? It’s like blaming soured milk for a drowned cat.’
The judge, caught picking at his teeth with a finger, lowers it. ‘Yes, I agree. Mr Pettigrew, I’m afraid you’ve lost me as well.’
‘I am going somewhere, My Lord.’ You turn back to the doctor. ‘Did you make any enquiries about Madame Benham? Her habits? How often she took opium, for example?’
The judge taps a hand on his bench. ‘Mr Pettigrew. At some point if a man hasn’t got anything on his hook, he might assume the problem is his bait.’
‘My Lord, I’ve been led to wonder whether Dr Wilkes overlooked the presence of opium in the stomach contents. I’m instructed that Mrs Benham was a laudanum addict ‒’
The doctor juts out his chin. ‘I’d been informed that Mrs Benham had been taking laudanum for some months, on advice of a physician. I can’t now remember his name. Folke? Falk?’
You glance at your paper. ‘Fawkes?’
‘Fawkes. Yes. I think that was it. The presence of the drug would have been entirely consistent with that medical history. Mrs Benham had attended her soirée earlier that evening, and appeared in perfectly good spirits. Testing for opium, even if such a thing could be done, would have been nothing but a wild-goose chase.’
‘Did you perform any tests?’
‘Mr Pettigrew,’ interrupts the judge. ‘Set yourself down a different path.’
‘My Lord.’ You take a step back. ‘Something else is troubling me, Doctor. Do you see here the clothes worn that evening by the victims?’
‘Yes.’
‘Well, then, look. His clothes are soaked. Bow to stern, as they say. Do you see? As if he bled and bled again. Like the old superstition which held that a corpse’s wounds would bleed when the killer approached ‒ “open their congealed mouths and bleed afresh”, as Shakespeare wrote. Yet hers are stained only lightly.’ The lavender-grey silk clings as you hold it up, a woman holding fast her lover’s ankles. Splashes of dark dried blood on the bodice. ‘How would you account for it?’
He pauses, folds his arms. ‘Simple, Mr Pettigrew. He had numerous wounds. Stabbed over and over, and stabbed deep. On the other hand, hers were not so deep.’
‘Not so deep?’
‘No.’ His voice blunt as granite. But he hesitates. A heartbeat. Or is that only the spinning in my head?
‘Yet you still swear positively that exsanguination was the cause of her death?’
I can’t look at Dr Wilkes. I can’t look anywhere. Velvet, brass and polished wood are all stripped away, until all I can see is her. The whole dread scene. The meat-slab of her laid out on a cold table. The black blood puddling through her lungs and heart. Her body nothing more than a sack for organs, a pop of eyes and tongue. I stumble forward. I cry out. Heads turn. One of the turnkeys takes a step towards me and I shake my head, to show them I’ll be good. I must try to compose myself. But now I can’t un-see it. What a mess they would have made of her! And I’d done the same. To so many. So many! I sway on my feet, close my eyes, fall into the darkness inside.
The turnkey steps forward, grips my wrist, yanks me back into place. ‘Sorry,’ I whisper. ‘Sorry.’ I look up meekly, snatch for breath. The judge nods, and he releases me and steps back, but I’ve lost the thread of what the doctor was saying, have to lean forward to pick it up again.
‘. . . it was obvious from the bodice, Mr Pettigrew, just as it was obvious from the body.’ But he blusters when he says it, and looks unsure.
As you take your seat, Jessop gives an annoyed little toss of his head, and I see that, for the first time, there’s a ruffle to his crow-black feathers. He darts a look behind him. ‘I have no further questions for this witness, M’Lud, and, quite frankly, I’m surprised he had to be troubled to come back here for such a damp probing as that.’
But both Jessop and the doctor look up, towards each other, when you say you wish to call Dr John Pears. The courtroom falls silent. All eyes turn to me in the dock, as they do whenever we must stop and wait. Dr Wilkes stops, going up the steps, wipes his hand along his breeches. The room waits. After a few minutes, Tomkin scurries out, comes back in. Shakes his head, then goes out again. You narrow your eyes up at the gallery before turning back to your papers. ‘My Lord, I – ah, might I request a brief adjournment, to take instructions?’
When you come back, you give a twitch of your gown, which hangs flattened and black. It has slipped, and your smile has slipped, too.
‘My Lord, it seems it will be Dr Lushing this morning, not Dr Pears. I wonder if we might adjourn again until the half-hour, to allow him time to arrive.’
‘Very well, Mr Pettigrew. Let’s hope Dr Lushing hasn’t also disappeared,’ says the judge, snickering at his own joke.
Dr Wilkes, arms hooked over the gallery railing, gives a single blunt nod. When I look up again he’s gone, and you are too. Leaving me to wonder what it’s all about.
Doctors all seem to have skittering hands and skin under their eyes that sags like purses. As if it’s a profession that draws men unable to sleep or sit still. Dr Lushing tugs at his side-whiskers while he waits for you to start. You have been shaken by something, I can see it. By what? You draw a deep breath, tap the papers in front of you. You’re composing yourself. You fiddle your gown up, then remind him of my claim to have taken laudanum on the night of the murders, which rendered me unable to remember anything thereafter.
He leans forward. ‘Oh, yes, I was very interested in your client’s claim, Mr Pettigrew. Most interested. It has the hallmarks of a classic stupor. There’s been a great deal of scientific debate recently covering these states. Somnambulism, animal magnetism, mesmerism.’ He ticks them off on his fingers. ‘All of those states seem to involve consciousness and unconsciousness to the same degree and at the same time. A split down the middle, one could say. The person affected can still have the will to act – people have indeed been known to perform very complicated actions – but the moral nature is entirely wanting, because they have lost the regulating power of their own minds. In other words, they are not responsible, not in a moral sense anyway. Somnambulism is more common than the man on the street, or even the man on the jury benches, might think. Alfred the Great was a sufferer, as was La Fontaine. Condillac.
‘It is a kind of insanity, in the sense that it is also a kind of dreaming awake, a link, if you will, between dreaming and insanity. It causes the sufferer to act on false impressions as if they are real.’
‘I see.’ You glance at the jurors. ‘For example, a woman might believe an infant to be hidden under a hedge and set about looking for it, though there is no such thing?’
‘Yes! Exactly that. In such a state, one of my patients wrote an entire symphony yet next morning remembered not a single note. Another walked the lanes around his own estate all night, shot a fox and dragged the body back all the way through his own top field. Next morning, he swore he’d been in bed the whole time and he’d still believe that, too, except the whole thing had been witnessed by the local priest.’
‘Those were somnambulistic trances? Sleepwalking, in colloquial terms?’
‘Correct.’
‘Could the same state be produced by an excessive consumption of opium?’
‘That’s what excited me about your case, Mr Pettigrew. I believe, quite strongly indeed from what you’ve told me, that what your client experienced was akin to a somnambulistic trance, except of course we’re talking not about a sleeping state but a soporific one. Under an excess of opium, as in a dream, a user might also act under false impressions. The delirium in this instance created by the drug itself. But the memory of those actions could then be obliterated by the stupefying effect, resulting in the same split in consciousness.’ He hooks his fingers on his own lapels, as if he’s the prosecutor, rolling out his argument like a tailor’s cloth. ‘These matters, gentlemen, are as exciting, as reliable, as any of the century’s scientific advances. You may have faith in that.’
You look pleased with yourself again, reaching up to finger your wig.
But frustration knots my guts. This might be a good lawyer’s trick, but it siphons up all my own doubts, all my own fears. As if my own defence will be the very thing that seals my guilt.
This is planting someone else’s idea like a cuckoo in my head. If you killed her, Frances, this is how. Twin shapes, shadows moving in the dark, until one goes cold. But is that real? I know that blackness all too well. My heart staggers behind my ribs. It would have been unknowing. Of all Lushing’s paid-for words, I cling to that.
When it’s his turn, Jessop tosses his papers onto the barristers’ table. ‘Insanity! That is indeed an accurate assessment of this entire defence.’
‘Well, no, that’s not what I –’
‘Do you mean to suggest that the prisoner could have killed Mr Benham, taken herself upstairs, killed his wife, cleaned the carpet and the knife, and then – presto! ‒ got into bed, all in this alleged somnambulistic state?’
‘Oh, yes, very possible and I should say –’
‘The savagery to butcher them both, yet the presence of mind for all that . . . tidying up.’ He huffs out a laugh. ‘It’s hardly likely, Doctor. Those are not involuntary actions. Not some pitiable automaton, but a person making decisions, acting with care and deliberation, even self-interest.’
‘As I’ve said, Mr Jessop, there is the will to act, yes, but there is this form of mental derangement laid over it. Think of the moment between sleep and waking, when it is difficult for the mind to be conscious of its own condition or even the condition or location of the body. It is a form of derangement close to that, save that it can last for hours.’
‘Sleepwalking!’ Jessop throws up his hands, spins around to the jury benches. ‘My friend makes a circus of this court.’
You jump up, palms flat on the table. ‘My Lord, were I permitted, I’d argue that my client’s state amounted as a matter of law to non-insane automatism. It might be novel, but isn’t that how the law develops? By looking for advances, by building on foundations –’
‘Mr Pettigrew.’ The judge pinches his lips together. ‘You are sneaking argument in through the back door again.’
‘Nor can he cut his cake both ways, My Lord,’ Jessop cries out. ‘Does the prisoner say she didn’t do this terrible thing? Or that she did it while sleepwalking? The sleepwalking defence kills her denial dead.’ He wags his lip, pleased as a cat with the warm squirm of feathers on his tongue.